May one dwell upon so simple a thing as a small family dinner-party? It is generally undramatic and uneventful: it is not generally marked even by a new dish or a bottle of rare wine. Yet there lingers in the mind of every man the recollection of pleasant dinners. I should like to write a Book of Dinners--not a book for the _gourmet_, but a book of memories. It might be a most delightful volume. There would be in it the school-boys' dinner. I remember a certain dinner at eighteenpence a head, at Richmond, before we had the row in the boat, when we quarrelled and broke the oars over each other's heads, and very nearly capsized: a certain undergraduates' dinner, in which four men--three of whom are now ghosts--joined: the Ramblers' dinner, of lamb chops and bottled ale and mirth and merriment: the two-by-two dinner in the private room, a dainty dinner of sweet lamb, sweet bread, sweet peas, sweet looks, sweet Moselle, and sweet words. Is it really true that one never--never--gets young again? Some people do, I am sure, but they are under promise to say nothing about it. I shall--and then that dinner may perhaps--one cannot say--one never knows--and I suppose--if one was young again--that they would be found just as pretty as they ever were. There is the official dinner, stately and cold: the city dinner, which generally comes to a man when his digestion is no longer what it was: the family dinner, in which the intellect plays so small a part, because no one wastes his fine things on his brothers and sisters: the dinner at which one has to make a speech. Indeed, this Book of Dinners promises to be a most charming volume. I should attempt it, however, with trembling, because, to do it really well, one should be, first of all, a scholar, if only to appreciate things said and spoken, and in order to connect the illustrious past with food and drink. Next, he ought to be still young: he certainly must have a proper feeling for wine, and must certainly understand when and why one should be grateful to good Master Cook: he should be a past or present master in the Art of Love and a squire of Dames: he should be good at conversation: he must, in the old language, be a worshipper of Bacchus, Venus, Phoebus Apollo, the Muses nine and the Graces three. He must be no poor weakling, unable to enjoy the good creatures of flesh, fowl, fish, and wine: no boor: and no log insensible to loveliness.